In recent years, many different additive manufacturing techniques for the fast production of three-dimensional (3D) objects have been developed. Additive manufacturing and related variations thereof are sometimes referred to as 3D printing, solid imaging, solid freeform fabrication, rapid prototyping and manufacturing and the like. Additive manufacturing includes many different techniques for forming three-dimensional objects on a layer-by-layer basis from a build material utilizing layer or sliced data representing cross-sections of the objects. These techniques include, for example, extrusion-deposition or selective deposition modeling (SDM) techniques such as fused deposition modeling (FDM) and fused filament fabrication (FFF), stereolithography (SLA), polyjet printing (PJP), multi-jet printing (MJP), selective laser sintering (SLS), three-dimensional printing (3DP) techniques such as color-jet printing (CJP), and the like.
A number of additive manufacturing techniques form a three-dimensional object from a corresponding digital solid model, which is often provided by a computer-aided design system (this solid model at times referred to as a CAD model). The solid model may represent the object and its structural components by a collection of geometry. This solid model may be exported to another form that represents the closed-form surface geometry of the object, which at times may be referred to as a shell. In some examples, the shell of an object may take the form of a mesh of polygons (e.g., triangles), such as in the case of an STL (standard tessellation language) model or file. The shell of the object may then be sliced into layer data that defines layers of the shell. This layer data may be formatted into an appropriate language that describes a tool path for forming the object, which may be received by an additive manufacturing system to manipulate build material to form the object on a layer-by-layer basis.
Although existing additive manufacturing techniques are adequate, it is also generally desirable to improve on existing techniques.